“We all have two choices: We can make a living or we can design a life.” Jim Rohn

Make a living…design a life? What does that mean anyway?

Just making a living is easy. You study and learn how to do something, and then you find somebody who will pay you to do that something.

When you spend your life making a living you sell your time to someone else – helping her or him get the things she or he wants in life.

The question to ask yourself is: “Is that what I want to do with my life?”

In my younger days my parents told me that I’d need a high school education to get a good job working for someone else. Let me say that again: working for someone else!

We’re going to get into that somewhat in this article. And you’ll understand that I don’t believe so much today the same things that I believed when I was younger.

Not when it comes to making another person’s dreams come true. Especially if it means that I must give away my dreams while I’m doing it.

When I was a kid the thing to do was go to school and graduate (and that is important as it adds to your resume, and teaches you how to learn), get a good job and work at that job until you reached 65 years old, then retire and relax until you died.

And for a lot of people life happened pretty much that way back then.

They work most of their lives, and then figure they will retire on social security. They lived the rest of their lives relaxing, and taking it easy.

Today things are a little different. I’ve seen a change in the belief that a person should settle down in one job until they reach the age for retirement. Very often a person now works in three, or more, careers during their working lives. And all that time they work for someone else’s dreams.

Today the social security fund is about broke. Many people don’t believe it will survive much longer. Including me. And if we’re wrong about that social security most definitely won’t be the same in the near future as it is today.

Maybe I’ll talk about social security some more in a future article. Right now I want to talk about some ideas for you to think about when it comes to designing life your way.

Plan your life – or somebody else will plan it for you.

If you want to spend your life building another person’s dreams for them – that’s OK. Plenty of people out there will happily tell you what to do.

But I wish for you a much happier and more fulfilling life. And I hope that you wish that for yourself as well.

The only way you can get that is to plan your life the way you want. Decide the work you want to do. Determine the kind of person you want to become. What places do you want to visit? How do you want to play?

You have to set goals, and then you have to do the things that make those goals come true.

I spent too many years wasting my life without knowing what I wanted for my future. Because of that I lost a lot of fun. I’ve enjoyed much of my life but I could’ve made it better.

Have you heard the saying that when you don’t know where you’re going any road takes you there?

I did a lot of life studying during the last few years. And one of the most important things I learned is that having goals (and working toward those goals) makes life more interesting, more fun, and happier.

And when you’re happy people love to hang around you because you make them a little happier too.

Isn't that one way to measure success in life?